“This climate don’t agree with her like Hodge Street,” Grandma explained. “I tell her any day she says the word we’ll pack up and go back there. I’d just as soon now anyway if Lois is coming back. It’ll be criticism from morning till night, every little thing I do, when she gets here. I wouldn’t be a bit surprised if she’d put it up to Mr. Sweeney not to help me anymore.”

“I told you you should have nabbed him yourself,” Mrs. Carmel gasped, with a flourish of her bandana before replacing it in her blouse. “Why, Mr. Willard, when this woman here was wearing that transformation she could have got any man in town. Why didn’t you wear it tonight?”

“I’m not going to wear it anymore,” Grandma said sorrowfully, and picked up the newspaper again with the picture of Mr. Sweeney.

Papa took out his watch and said he had a good notion to meet the seven-thirty Express in case the bride and groom came in on it. He thought he’d leave the girls for a little visit and stop back for them. Maybe he’d bring back Lena, he said. Mrs. Carmel, who had dressed up especially for her friend’s son-in-law, urged him to stay and talk over the business and goings-on around town. She said she and Grandma were kind of disappointed in the Junction, things being so slow. Of course, that business about Bonnie Purdy had stirred things up a little, but being cooped up in the shop all day they didn’t get a chance to hear news that a person like Papa, in an undertaking parlor, would hear. Papa had his hat on the side of his head and a hand on the doorknob, but he paused to look questioningly from Grandma to Mrs. Carmel.

“What about Bonnie Purdy? Isn’t she still at the Gas Company in Lesterville?” he wanted to know.

“Not now. The Party she used to run with, not to mention any names, went to her boss and got her fired after this other Party stepped in. Told the whole story, so Bonnie got the sack.” Mrs. Carmel happily wheezed out her information, interrupted herself to take a tremendous snort of her smelling salts, thrusting it dangerously up a nostril and placing a bony finger on the other one for maximum effect. “Don’t say I said so, but Mrs. Stewart down in the Fair Store says there’s other Parties mixed up in it. My, what won’t these girls do next! As I say to my partner here, I’m not sorry my own daughters are under the sod when I hear these stories. Why don’t you ask your company to stay and have a dish of pickled pigsfeet, Mrs. Reed?”

Papa said they had just eaten supper but he might have a snack when he came back in, a suggestion which pleased both old ladies. Grandma talked a good deal about how much she hated her early farm life, but she carried its routine in a small measure into whatever quarters she found herself. The apartment always smelled of cooking, a quart of berries being preserved, a few beets being pickled, a cheesecloth bag of sour cream dripping into a pan under the sink, later to emerge as a cupful of cottage cheese, and stone crocks of various leftovers of meats being pickled, jellied, or ground into sandwich paste. The room was so overwhelmed with these housekeeping demonstrations that its original commercial intent was quite obscured. The same lady in the rope wig guarded the cigar-box cash register, and the same pile of ancient sheet music was piled beside her, but Mrs. Carmel’s large sewing basket sat on top, filled with patterns and half-finished garments from many years back. She selected her latest effort from the basket for her evening’s work, a child’s coat of a singularly unwieldy carpet-like material. It was just a remnant, she said, from a sale in a big store in Paris, France, and though she had no particular child in mind, one would turn up come cold weather.